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USA markets closed down today - and were down over 1% for the week. Some say it was Apple's fault. Yet oil closed up, and recently oil and the markets have been moving in the same direction. Gold rose over $1300.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. housing starts slipped in May as the construction of multi-family housing units dropped, but further gains in building permits signaled a rebound that would support economic growth in the second quarter.

(Reuters) - Apple Inc said its iPhone 6 and 6 Plus were still available for sale in China after Beijing's intellectual property regulators barred their sales saying the designs had infringed a patent held by a Chinese company.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The unions representing nearly 40,000 wireline workers of Verizon Communications Inc ratified a new labor deal on Friday ending a months-long dispute that led to an employee strike that lasted nearly seven weeks, the company said.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A lawyer for General Motors on Friday asked a U.S. judge to bar "unprecedented" claims on behalf of millions of customers who say their vehicles lost value because the GM brand was damaged by dozens of recalls, including one for a faulty ignition switch.

(Reuters) - Eldridge Industries, the U.S. owner of TV production company Dick Clark Productions and magazines Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter, told Reuters on Friday that it had hired investment banks to carry out a review of its media holdings.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former Countrywide Financial Corp CEO Angelo Mozilo will not face a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit for defrauding investors in mortgage-backed securities issued before the 2008 financial crisis, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday.

Jeff McGrath has been fed up about his property taxes going up for years in McHenry County, Illinois. However when McGrath was told that taxes would go up another 26% this year and nobody could provide any explanation for it, he had enough, and decided that a statement needed to be made.

That statement, as it turns out, was to pay the first installment of his commercial and residential property taxes in single dollar bills. McGrath said that by doing so, perhaps someone would relay that to the tax assessor that people are not happy about what's taking place.

"I built my house in 1999, here in Woodstock inside the city limits. The first hint I got was a $13,000 permit fee so that we could even start building. The taxes in the first year and the second year were like $2,500 a year and then seventeen years later, this year they jumped 26%, and I'm at $11,600 a year, and no one can explain why. Why 26% in one year, I didn't change anything, I didn't build anything, I didn't add anything, it's just out of control."

"Out of frustration, I said that because the tax bill jumped like that for no explanation then I'm going to pay it in single dollar bills. I would like to pay it in change but they don't accept that. I started gathering up singles, and a lot of them, the first installment for my commercial property and my residential was almost $16,000 in singles.

This week the Bank of England announced that it would follow the lead of the Federal Reserve and maintain interest rates at .5%. The bank didn't stop there however, warning voters that next week's Brexit referendum posed "the largest immediate risk facing UK financial markets, and possibly also global financial markets. " Considering the growing public support for the UK's separation from the EU, the statement can be seen as a last ditch effort by the BoE to push back against the effort and the move has been strongly criticized by British politicians skeptical of the EU.

Of course central bankers using their position of influence to try to street the actions of both policy makers and voters is nothing unusual. (In fact, manipulation of public opinion has become an explicit policy tool of central bankers in recent years.)

In 2008, for example, it was an intense scare campaign lead personally Chairman Bernanke and Secretary Henry Paulson that helped finally push lawmakers to agree to the Wall Street bailout.

In his book An Act of Congress, Robert Kaiser detailed Bernanke's warnings to lawmakers.

The British pound logs its first weekly gain in three weeks, as worries that the U.K. might leave the European Union in next week's referendum ease a bit after both sides temporarily suspend their campaigns following the murder of a British lawmaker on Thursday.

U.S. Treasurys and other safe-haven government bonds rose slightly Friday, having a brief respite from precipitous declines as investors anxiously await the outcome of the U.K. vote on whether to leave or stay in the European Union

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